saavedra77 | "Don't take Sunset" (Reply)

Last Thursday, I went to listen to Salman Rushdie read from his newest novel, Shalimar the Clown. I've been reading Rushdie since college, and I've thought very highly of previous efforts such as Midnight's Children, The Jaguar Smile, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor's Last Sigh; I've been less impressed with a few books, such as Shame and Fury.

To judge by the passages we heard, Shalimar the Clown is in many ways quite typical of Rushdie's writing: a tragic story wrapped in gallows humor; varied, lively settings--in this case ranging from German-occupied France in the 1940s to Kashmir in the 1960s to contemporary Los Angeles; and the prose is standard Rushdie, as well--breathless, colloquial, digressive.

Shalimar does sound like a particularly promising Rushdie novel, though, if for no other reason because the author seems so invested in the subject matter: the story is rooted in the struggle over Kashmir and in "the psychology of fanaticism"--subjects which Rushdie, as he ruefully noted, "knows something about": his family is of Kashmiri extraction and he has very strong feelings about what's happened to the place in the half-century since partition; and, of course, there was that fatwa calling for Rushdie's assassination (the fatwa was later rescinded--hence Rushdie's current freedom to fly around the world flogging new books). I'll let you know what else I think about the novel after I've finished reading it ...

One other aspect of the evening deserves comment, though: If you've ever attended a public question-and-answer session, you've probably heard fellow audience members direct a few cringe-worthy questions at the people on the podium. This time, in addition to the usual ridiculous stuff ("What's the most important lesson you've learned in life?" Rushdie responded by paraphrasing Marlene Deitrich about not taking Sunset when driving in L.A.), there were a series of questions along the lines of: "Wise Man from abroad, why is our country so inadequate?" I was impressed that Rushdie, who in fact shares few sympathies with our current government, was having none of it. Asked by one older man why U.S. fiction was so lacking in "humor," Rushdie simply replied: "I'm sorry, but I think you're wrong," and then praised the comedic virtues of Mark Twain, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth. Asked by a youngish woman why Americans were "less welcoming to children" than people in other countries, Rushdie suggested that she might just need to "make better friends."

Departing from the subject of American self-loathing, another questioner lobbed Rushdie the profoundly loaded missive "What do you think of organized religion?" ... Well, how would you expect a British-accented satirist who was formerly the target of a religiously-inspired death threat to respond to that? "In short, I'm against it."

(Next post: I hike Mt Rainier!)